America’s Team (aka The Team You Love to Hate…No, The Other One)

I can pinpoint the exact date when I became a Dallas Cowboys fan. On January 15, 1978, I was a young boy living in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, but without any attachment to the Lions when my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Tommy came over to watch Super Bowl XII between the Cowboys and the Denver Broncos. Uncle Tommy had bet money on the Broncos, so each time the Cowboys scored his face would twist into a painful grimace. Since I was an eight-year-old smart aleck, I thought it was hilarious and soon found myself quite naturally rooting for the Cowboys and against my uncle. When Dallas scored its final points, putting the game out of reach for the Broncos, Uncle Tommy actually slid off the couch in disgust, making me laugh out loud until my mother shushed me. My uncle passed away only a few years later, so that night remains my strongest memory of him. I’ll never know how much money he lost that night, but I gained a team.

Perhaps because I took pleasure in my uncle’s pain, the Cowboys rewarded me with a string of painful losses: to the Steelers a year later in Supe XIII (thank you, Jackie Smith); to Montana and Clark; to Riggins and the Hogs. Soon enough they descended into mediocrity and irrelevance, until Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson came to the rescue and rebuilt the franchise.

Any football fan can tell you what happened next. Jerry and Jimmy turned the team upside down, traded Herschel Walker, drafted Aikman and Emmitt, and started winning Super Bowls. Author Jeff Pearlman starts with what we know and goes deeper, talking to everyone who had anything to do with the team during that era, ranging from the players and coaches to the reporters who covered them to the women who slept with them. The result is Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, a revealing and engaging look at one of the greatest teams in NFL history. Recently Jeff was kind enough to talk with me about the book. Enjoy.

BronxBanter
I’m guessing that this book was kind of a perfect storm – high profile football players that haven’t yet faded from the public consciousness, lots of Super Bowls, lots of sex, and lots of drugs. How long after you started this project did you realize you had hit a goldmine?

Jeff Pearlman
I would say I actually knew even before I started it. I’ll be totally honest with you – I haven’t even said this to anyone. I had a really, really, really good feeling about this book early on. Early on. This was basically my way of thinking. My first book about the ’86 Mets made the Times best seller list for six or seven weeks, and I didn’t expect it to. I had no expectations at all because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, it was my first book, and it made it. My kind of way of thinking with this, the Cowboys were like the Mets on steroids. You’re talking about a team that’s probably the most popular sports franchise in the country, much more famous figures. With the Mets, yeah, you’re talking Gooden and Strawberry, but then Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter are big New York figures, but they’re not national guys. With the Cowboys – Aikman, Deion, Emmitt, Irvin, Switzer, Jerry, Jimmy… it was pretty bountiful.

BB
And they were on the stage for a long time.

JP
Right, right. And they’re still in the media spotlight as national guys. So I had a very, very strong feeling. Now I learned from my Barry Bonds book. My second book was about Barry Bonds, and I learned from that book that timing is very important. That book came out two weeks after Game of Shadows and bombed. So you never know what’s going to happen – I learned that the hard way – but I had a very good feeling about it.

BB
Like with your Bonds book from a couple years ago, I see that you talked to well over a hundred people for this one. What was your process like from beginning to end?

JP
The first thing I do when I sit down for a book like this is, I used to work for Sports Illustrated, so they let me use their library. I go to their library and I make photocopies of every yearbook for the times I’m covering. And then I’d do files for every guy in the yearbooks – every executive, every player, every guy who was drafted, every free agent invitee, guys who made the team, guys who didn’t make the team – and I try to track them down. That’s the first thing I do. At the same time, I use a Nexus account. Do you know what Nexus is?

BB
I know what it is, yeah. A database.

JP
A newspaper data base, right. From the years I’m writing about, I’ll do a search of headline leads for the words “Dallas Cowboys,” and I’ll go through every story between those years that talks about the Dallas Cowboys. I ended up printing out probably 6,000 pages of articles that I’ll go through one by one. So those are the two main reporting chores, and then through those articles you find more people. You’ll read about some guy who opened up a car dealership with Troy Aikman or some guy who walked Michael Irvin’s dog, stuff like that. So that’s how you do it. I don’t know if it’s the best way, it’s just how I’ve done it.

BB
Well, it’s certainly a thorough way. How long is it usually from your first trip to the library – well, I suppose you’re probably researching and writing at the same time to a certain extent, but…

JP
Oh, no I don’t, actually. I usually research it as much as I can, and then I sit down and give myself four months to write or five months to write or whatever time I have to write. You report along the way while you’re writing a little bit, but I try to get most of it out of the way ahead of time.

BB
It seemed to me that not too many of these players were very remorseful about what they had done, no different really than when I talk to old college buddies and we laugh about stupid things we did when we were drunk – only we weren’t sniffing coke off a hooker’s ass, we were wrestling in the dorm hallway. How many of these guys have a sense of how out of control they were?

JP
I think most of them did, but it’s kind of like you just said. Certainly I did things in college I’m not very proud of, but most of them I’m pretty willing to tell the stories about. I don’t mind telling stories about getting wasted on Maddog 20/20 and vomiting in an alley. I’m not really embarrassed by that stuff, and think most of these guys aren’t either. I think they sort of look at it sort of joyfully. I think they were fully aware of the implications of what they did…

BB
But they’re still good stories to tell.

JP
Yeah, they had the stories and they were happy to tell ‘em. Most of these guys aren’t Troy Aikman. They’re not on TV, and they’re not in the spotlight. These are guys like Kenny Gant working in a factory, or Clayton Holmes sort of homeless in South Carolina, so this was the best time in their lives, and they’ll talk to you for ten hours if you’re willing to sit there.

BB
It seems like a professional locker room must be a breeding ground for behavior like this, and that an NFL locker room is probably like the Fertile Crescent of debauchery and self-destruction. Should any of this behavior be surprising, or should we expect it?

JP
I don’t think it’s surprising, but I don’t think it’s the norm for it to be this extreme. I’ve covered sports for fifteen years now, and most places aren’t like that, especially today. More than ever – it’s a cliché, but it’s true – people are so image conscious now and aware that wherever you go nowadays any boob with a freakin’ camera on his phone becomes a reporter and can post on Deadspin or YouTube or whatever. So this kind of stuff, I don’t think it happens as much as it used to, and I don’t even think clubhouses are quite as wild. You know it’s rare that you have a full-family environment in a sports clubhouse. You just don’t see it that often. I saw it with the Oakland A’s a little bit in the late 90s, but I haven’t seen it since, so I think the Cowboys are actually rarer than you might think.

BB
That’s interesting. That was one thing that I wondered about. Even though this is only ten or fifteen years ago, the media world is a lot different now than it was then.

JP
Oh, yeah, drastically. Here’s the example I always use, and I think it’s a good one. I think it was last year, Matt Leinart shows up on Deadspin in a photo of him in a hot tub with two hotties and a beer, and there were probably millions of views of that picture. The guy wasn’t doing anything illegal. He’s twenty-four years old, single, living in Arizona, in a hot tub, drinking a beer with two women. Nothing wrong with that. He’s allowed to do that. He’s single. It wasn’t a picture of him attacking anyone or doing anything bad, but it became this huge controversial picture. Is this guy really dedicated to football? Now imagine you’re the Dallas Cowboys holding your position meetings in a strip club! I mean, it’s not even in the same ballpark. So I don’t think you can do what they did anymore and not worry about the ramifications.

BB
Kind of along those same lines, I’m interested in your personal opinion – or maybe professional opinion on this. What is a journalist’s responsibility to the team he or she covers as compared to the public’s need to know? Or, I guess, what does the public need to know? These 90s Cowboys were breaking laws and putting themselves and others at serious risk, so I think people probably should’ve been writing about all that a lot sooner than they did. But where is the line? When is it okay for a journalist to keep certain details out of game reports, and when is it time to blow the whistle?

JP
I don’t think it’s a matter of game reports. I don’t know if it’s a line so much as it’s almost apples and oranges. I think it’s a really complicated question. Because let’s say you’re covering the Dallas Cowboys. You’re jock-tailing. You’re covering the Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News, and you need these guys to talk to you.

BB
Yeah, you need a relationship.

JP
You needthese guys to talk to you, and you hear a rumor about them, whatever, sleeping around with hookers. What are you gonna do, put that in your game notes? I mean, what can you do with it? I think what these guys are supposed to do and should do, is tell their sports editor and give it to their investigative writer or takeout writer or something like that to handle it, because you can’t expect your beat writers to really report on this stuff, it’s just not realistic. Now at the same time, I wrote about in the book about one of their broadcasters, Dale Hansen, was at parties, going out with these guys at parties where they were smoking pot, and then he’s calling the games on Sundays. And he was proud of it, and I thought it was a joke. I think he really missed an obligation there. You cannot be covering the Cowboys and hanging out with them. That crosses a very thorough line.

BB
I’d love to have an answer to this question, whether you want it to be on or off the record.

JP
I’ll answer any question you got.

BB
Alright. What’s your opinion of Skip Bayless? He’s always struck me as an arrogant ass who became nationally known simply because he happened to be writing for a Dallas paper during the Cowboy dynasty, and then he kinda traded his integrity for fame and notoriety. Is that a fair assessment or am I missing something?

JP
No, I think it’s pretty fair. I’m alarmed in this profession… I understand it to a certain degree, because print journalism is hurting majorly right now. The money’s not there, papers are folding, papers are cutting back, so I understand guys going to TV. What I don’t like is when I see these shows like Around the Horn…

BB
Oy.

JP
You know, all these shows where these guys I respect, these guys I read for years, are freaking screaming at each other. Because good writing is almost, not even almost, good writing is the complete opposite of that. Good writing is trying to make a point using dexterity. Finding a way to make a point without hammering it, but making a very smart, well-informed, detailed opinion, and offering it there and hoping people see your point of view. It’s not screaming as loud as you can. I feel like Bayless, I mean Bayless is a great writer. The guy’s really talented, and can write a freakin’ story like you wouldn’t believe. But I feel like he got wooed by the dark side somewhere along the line. He almost had the opposite path that I did. When I was in college, I wrote for my college paper and my goal was to write and use it to meet women. That was my thing, I thought I’ll get attention and I’ll meet women.

BB
Because that makes perfect sense.

JP
Right, right, right. Whatever, I was twenty years old and I was an idiot. But you kind of learn over time the true joy of writing. You see it is as almost like an artform. It’s a really complicated process, and I really enjoy it and I dig into it. I almost feel like Skip took the opposite approach. The guy used to write these great stories, was pretty masterful with the words, but then one day he realized if he yells, he gets a lot more attention. So now he yells. That’s what he does, he’s a yeller. I cannot watch him on TV without getting mad.

BB
I agree. Okay, just talking about the football, how good were these Cowboys between the lines? The NFL is obviously very different right now, but how would those teams compare to the recent Patriots, for example?

JP
I think better. I think they were more talented across the board, I think they were deeper. One thing that’s overlooked, they were just able to shuttle guys in. Their defensive line, just as an example, they were eight deep on the defensive line. You don’t see that these days. Their secondary, talk about a secondary. Kevin Smith and Deion Sanders were both shutdown corners, Darren Woodson was the best safety in the league. Their backfield, obviously, with Emmitt, Aikman, Moose Johnston, Novacek. Across the board, great. Great, great, great. All-time great team. Has to be one of the top four or five teams in the history of football.

BB
And what about Jimmy Johnson? What was his impact on the team?

JP
Profound. He was the builder. That’s his main thing. He wasn’t a great Xs and Os coach, I don’t even think he would say he was. But he was a great motivator, he knew talent, he knew what buttons to push with the guys, so very, very profound.

BB
That brings something else up that I’ve kind of always wondered, and then in reading this book it triggered some things: the role of an NFL head coach as opposed to an NBA coach or something like that. It seems like Jimmy Johnson built the team from a personnel standpoint, but as far as the actual day-to-day coaching, he might not have been as important. I read an interview where you said your dad compared Jimmy Johnson to a CEO. Is that accurate that he’s not as much of a ball coach, like Spurrier talks about?

JP
Sure. I think the best coaches, from what I’ve seen over the years, the best coaches are master delegators. He had a great offensive coordinator in Norv Turner, and he trusted him. He had a great defensive coordinator in Dave Wannstadt, and he trusted him. He had guys like Dave Campo and Butch Davis around who he just trusted, period. His strength was motivating, putting guys in the right position, getting the right guys, and then trusting his assistants to sort of do the right things. Norv Turner was a better offensive football mind than Jimmy Johnson, and he knew that. Dave Wannstadt was a better defensive football mind than Jimmy Johnson, and he knew that too. And I think that’s as genius as anything, recognizing your limitations and acting on them properly.

BB
So after the implosion, along comes Barry Switzer. At the time, I saw Switzer as kind of a buffoon, and I always thought his press conferences were better than most sit-coms.

JP
Yeah.

BB
After reading your book, though, it seems like I had no idea what a buffoon he really was. How did he luck into that job, how did he manage to win a Super Bowl, and how did he eventually fly the whole thing into the ground?

BB
Well, I don’t blame him entirely for flying it into the ground, first of all. It’s funny. It all depends on vantage point whether you think he was handed a great situation or a lousy situation. On the one hand, he was given this team that won two straight Super Bowls, so he inherited a great team with a lot of talent and a good coaching staff. On the other hand, a very, very tough job to walk into because if you don’t win another Super Bowl, you’re considered a failure. And people do need to remember, he led them to an NFC title game and he won another Super Bowl. It’s hard to kill him for that. Many people say, oh, they definitely would’ve won another Super Bowl in ’94. You can’t say definitely. I mean, he took ‘em to the NFC Championship game and the 49ers were awfully good. How did he get the job? He got the job because Jerry Jones wanted more control, and he wanted a guy who would allow him to have that control and wouldn’t put up a fight, and would be loyal. Jerry was really, really mad with Jimmy Johnson when he showed interest in the Jacksonville coaching job. That really turned him off and put the question in Jerry’s mind whether Jimmy was truly loyal to the Cowboys and truly committed to what he was doing. He knew Switzer would be. Switzer didn’t have any other options. It’s not like Switzer was a hot commodity on the coaching circuit and was gonna go somewhere else and use the Cowboy job to get something. He knew him, he knew him for a long time from college, so I think for Jerry it was a pretty easy choice.

BB
Amongst the players, there is obviously one true star of your book, I think. Or a breakout star, I guess.

JP
Michael Irvin.

BB
No, no, no.

JP
Oh, Haley?

BB
Yes. Talk to me about Charles Haley.

JP
It’s funny, I consider Irvin the star of the book, and Haley…

BB
Right, I think there’s Irvin and Smith and Aikman, but I really think the book is about Irvin.

JP
Yeah, me too.

BB
But Charles Haley… I knew he was kind of a knucklehead. I followed the team, so I remember when he threw his helmet at Jerry Jones and some of the other antics, but I had no idea…

JP
Yeah, he liked to masturbate. I don’t know, he was, the first thing I gotta say, a great player, and should be in the Hall of Fame. I don’t know how Charles Haley’s not in the Hall of Fame. I don’t get it. The most Super Bowl rings of all time, a hundred plus sacks, to me he was right there with Bruce Smith and Reggie White as fierce defensive ends. So I don’t totally get that. But he was clinically insane and he acted the part. Guys either stood up to him and decided I’m not gonna take shit from this guy, or he made your life miserable. A lot of guys – Shante Carver, Robert Jones, Larry Brown – they tip-toed around that guy and never wanted to deal with him. And then were guys like James Washington who stood up to him and said get the fuck out of my face. And if you could deal with him that way, he was a great teammate, but if you were always afraid of him, if you let him bully you, just like in high school if you’re dealing with some bully, he made your life miserable as you were always tip-toeing around that locker room.

BB
Then there’s Emmitt Smith. His image was always pretty positive, but your book paints a different picture. Probably not to the extreme of Irvin or Alvin Harper or some of the others, but he was no innocent either, right?

JP
Well, it’s not that he was a bad guy. People always say, oh, you really did a job on Emmitt Smith. I never looked at it that way. I didn’t think he was a bad guy, he was just an egotist to a major degree. You know, we create these guys. It’s not like he did anything wrong. We lavish praise on these guys, and then we’re sort of turned off. For example, Emmitt had his swimming pool, and on the bottom of his swimming pool he had his image in tile.

BB
Yeah, I remember that.

JP
I mean, that’s crazy. Who the hell would do that? But we make these guys. We praise these guys and love ‘em. The thing about Smith, he was a very selfish player, he was very statistically oriented, but the truth of the matter is if you’re a running back who’s running for 1,800 yards, averaging 4.5 yards a carry and scoring twenty touchdowns, you could be the most statistically oriented guy in the world and it doesn’t make a damn’s worth of difference, you know? So any criticism I put on that guy for being ego-centric, which he was, it’s relative. He was in a position where he could be that way and it didn’t impact the team in any way, shape, or form. They were still really good.

BB
One thing that really intrigued me, and we touched on it a little bit earlier, was the relationship between Aikman and Irvin. I remember watching Aikman’s retirement press conference, and he must’ve thanked about fifty teammates, including every offensive lineman who ever blocked for him, I think, but he saved Irvin for last, and broke down while talking about him. What was it between the two of them, two guys who on the surface couldn’t seem more different?

JP
Yeah, I love that relationship because it’s not like these guys were hanging out off the field all the time, but there was a general love and affection between the two guys and I think it comes down to a commonality of work ethic. Two guys who were really, really driven, really, really wanted to succeed, and needed each other. Irvin entered the league a year before Aikman, but both of them were questioned early on in their careers. Irvin was considered too slow, too injury-prone. Aikman too mechanical, too robotic. And they sort of emerged side by side, and they helped each other’s emergence, obviously. Aikman could throw Irvin the deep balls, and Irvin caught everything Aikman threw at him, as tough a receiver as you’ll find. I think the affection really comes from the work ethic and all they went through together. There’s a real love there, it’s a great story. Because like you said, two guys from totally different worlds who are now… it would be wrong to say they’re inseparable, because they’re not inseparable, they don’t even hang out together. But there’s a true love for one another.

BB
I wanted to ask also about Michael Irvin. He brought a lot, obviously, on himself, with all the off-field things he got himself into. But what’s your opinion generally of him?

JP
I like him. I find him very likeable. It’s funny, he’s the one guy… some people read this book and say, you were really hard on Irvin. Other guys say, wow, you really like Irvin. I think that’s a good sign for the book. I feel both. But I think at the end of the day, he’s such a redeeming character. He’s like the Bill Clinton of sports. You can hate Bill Clinton, you can be the most arch-right-wing, I hate Bill Clinton and everything he stands for, but you still have to admit he’s kind of likeable. There’s something about the guy you like. It’s the same thing with Michael Irvin. You can hate everything this guy stands for – the way he’s treated women, the drug abuse, etc., etc. But at the end of the day there’s still something about the guy that’s really endearing and unique and likeable. And that’s how I kind of feel about him. You write this book and you sort of live the 90s again, and you think about the way Michael Irvin treated people, and you’re disgusted and you feel horrible for his wife, but again – just like Bill Clinton, there’s something about the guy you just love. That’s how I kinda feel about him.

BB
Another interesting thing that surrounded that Aikman/Irvin relationship was the undercurrent of a racial divide on the Cowboys, something we’ve been hearing about in sports since 1947. Whether it’s Aikman, Novacek, and Johnston splitting off back then, or the Latino players in the Mets clubhouse separating from their teammates in 2008, it’s something we can’t get away from. True?

JP
Well, yeah…

BB
Or are these exceptions, do you think?

JP
No, it’s true. I’ve never been in a locker room that hasn’t had some sort of racial divide. Never. And I always find it depressing, because I’m a sort of liberal idealist times a thousand, and I always liked the idea of sports bringing people together.

BB
Right, right.

JP
Different ideas, different backgrounds. But when I went to college, it always bothered me, but you’d walk into the cafeteria and the black students would be sitting with the black students, the white students would be sitting with the white students, and the Hispanic students with the Hispanic students. So we kind of self-segregate ourselves. I think the locker room kind of represents society in that regard, and it’s kind of a bummer, but it is what it is.

BB
One of the problems with being in English major in college is that you tend to analyze everything as if it’s a Shakespearean play – except that this IS a Shakespearean play, or maybe a Greek tragedy – you just knew the fall was coming. Do you think there was any way Jerry Jones could’ve avoided that fall, or was he destined to gouge out his eyes in the end?

JP
Well, that’s a little exaggerated. The fall comes for every sports team, you can’t keep it going forever, it’s impossible. They won three Super Bowls in four years. It’s funny how everyone’s like, oh, they should’ve done so much more. I understood that with the ’86 Mets, because the Mets won one World Series and were very talented. I mean, the Cowboys won three fucking Super Bowls in four years! I don’t know what people want out of ‘em. It’s hard to say, oh, they should’ve won five, or they should’ve won six. They won three Super Bowls in four years, so I don’t actually see it really as a tragedy. There are some aftermaths that are kind of sad, but I feel like overall, I feel like it’s more a success story than a tragedy. Three Super Bowls in four years with a bunch of guys nobody wanted. I feel like overall it’s a positive.

BB
Okay. With Jerry Jones, I always felt like he was essentially a clone of George Steinbrenner. They’re both consumed with winning, they both piss off other owners even as they create revenue for their respective leagues, they both think they know a lot more than really do, and for a time they both even insisted on wearing sport coats with turtle necks. So their recent stadium concession deal seems to make perfect sense, doesn’t it? Do you see the similarities between these two guys?

JP
Definitely. They’re cut from the same cloth. The saddest part of it, they hide it pretty well, but they both have this kind of “screw the fans” mentality. Both stadiums are about money. They’re not about the need for new stadiums for the fans, they’re about making greater revenue and charging these people who’ve supported your team for years a ton of money. So I’m not so cool with that, but they’re definitely the same kind of guys. At the end of the day you’d have to say they’re good owners, but I don’t love the greed that goes with it.

BB
Finally, I’ve heard that you’re working on a Clemens book. I’m sure he’s been nothing but completely forthright and cooperative, right?

JP
[Laughing] Yeah, exactly.

BB
I’m sure you’re seeing a lot of similarities between Clemens and Bonds, one of your recent subjects. But with Bonds, he kind of built his asshole resume over the course of several years, or decades even. Now, even though there were negative stories out there about Clemens, his fall was pretty precipitous. For a long time he was this great American hero, and even held up in contrast to Bonds in a lot of ways, I think.

JP
Right.

BB
Were people just being naïve in thinking that Bonds was clearly juicing but that Clemens was simply a freak of nature?

JP
Yeah, I think so. It never helped Bonds that he didn’t treat people well. I think that was a big part of it. And there aren’t that many similarities between the two guys. If you take away the steroids – well, this sounds dumb – if you take away the steroids and the “baseball legend”, as far as their personalities, they are very drastically different. And Clemens is a lot more liked in general society than Bonds ever was. People actually kind of like the guy.

BB
So where are you at in that process with that book?

JP
Living in hell. Yeah, it’s a tough one. But it’s okay. I’ll be out relatively soon.

BB
Well, I’m looking forward to it. Finally, I’ve got one last question. You’ve spent much of your career sifting through the negative side of sports. I’m wondering how this affects you as a fan. Can you still root for your teams? Can you take your kids to a game and encourage them to have heroes? Or have you seen too much?

JP
I haven’t been a fan in a long time. I don’t have teams anymore, I really don’t. Not because of any sort of negativity as a sportswriter, but just because I feel like how can you cover teams and root for them? So I don’t have any teams. But I can still take my kids to a game and enjoy it. I took my daughter who’s five to an Islanders game last year and we had a great time. I still think sports are fun to watch, I still enjoy watching them. I would never encourage my kids to deem these people idols or people worthy of imitation in their lives. But my son’s name is Emmet, not after Emmitt Smith, but his name is Emmet, and I bought an Emmitt Smith poster for his room because I thought it was cool. I’m not saying he needs to be like Emmitt Smith, but sports is fun. At the end of the day, it’s fun. That’s what’s most important.